Digitally based multimedia, the combination of video and audio in a digital format for viewing on a digital device, and digital media such as images and animation is rapidly increasing in capacity and proliferation. Nearly every new personal computer manufactured today includes some form of multimedia. Sales of digital products such as cameras, video recorders, phones and televisions are steadily increasing. Multimedia is also becoming increasingly prevalent in the Internet realm as the growth of the Internet steadily and rapidly continues. Continued advances in these computer-based technologies have lead to not only increased performance, but also increased performance expectations by the users of such computer equipment. The industry has responded with increased speed for CD ROM drives, communication modems, and faster video and audio cards. These increased user expectations extend not only to hardware capability, but also to the processing capability of data.
For example, in areas such as multimedia and audio compression, data is processed so that it can be processed as a steady and continuous stream. This data is used in areas such as video conferencing, gaming, digital video discs (DVD), professional audio, telephony, and other areas where audio, video, or audio and video is digitally processed.
Rendering data almost always requires some form of processing among various modules in a system. For example, a video clip might require decoding in a dedicated hardware module, rasterizing the video fields in another hardware module, digital filtering of the audio in a software module, insertion of subtitles by another software module, parsing audio data to skip silent periods by a software module, etc. For streaming to work, the data must be processed as a steady stream and then rendered to audio and/or video. If the data isn't processed quickly enough, however, the presentation of the data will not be smooth.
In conventional client-server rendering, the data is processed at the server and sent in discrete virtual frames to the client where the frames are rendered. Each frame contains the entire data and information needed to render the frame, even if there is no change in the item being rendered. For example, every animation frame has the full amount of data and information to render the frame even if the frame is identical to an adjacent frame. As a result, the transmission of the data consumes a large amount of available bandwidth. This bandwidth consumption reduces the number of clients a server can support. Additionally, hardware on a client machine cannot be taken advantage of to process the data. For example, the server in processing the data does not have the ability to use the hardware features of client hardware such as 3D graphic accelerators.